A humanitarian and human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan. With nearly 11 million people already displaced—three million of them children—the country is now home to the most people rendered homeless by conflict worldwide, and its populace sits poised on the brink of a major famine. A collapsing medical system renders the war’s true death...
On Friday 23 February, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has removed the United Arab Emirates from its “gray list”. The move, critics say, has more to do with political considerations than with any real improvement in fighting money laundering on the part of the UAE authorities. The United Arab Emirates were first added...
As the U.S. opioid crisis spirals further out of control, and threatens to engulf Europe, the U.S. government has been scrambling in recent weeks for solutions. Some are sensible, if misguided, such as the Biden administration’s “fentanyl strike force” within the Treasury Department to aggressively scrutinize the finances of suspected narcotics dealers. Others, such as...
Bertrand Monnet is a professor, but his field work and research is a little… unusual. Bertrand Monnet is a professor of economic crime at EDHEC Business School in Lille, France. But he’s not like the professors you had at university, quietly sinking five pints of ale in the local each night before plodding off home to watch Blackadder repeats....
Two men from London have become the fifteenth and sixteenth members of a £100m+ money laundering network to be convicted, following a major National Crime Agency investigation into cash smuggling from the UK to the UAE. Guilty verdicts were returned yesterday (11 January) on Ali Al-Nawab, 40, from Golders Green, London, and Mehdi Amrollahbibiyouki, 41,...
By ALISHA HOULIHAN for AML Intelligence GREYLISTED UAE has made a “substantial donation” to the funding of the body representing the world’s police Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). The Egmont Group of FIUs represents most of the main FIUs and held its most recent annual conference at a glittering venue in Abu Dhabi. Today (Wed) the...
Our second series investigates the rise and fall of a Dubai-based super cartel. The Financial Times’ award-winning podcast series Hot Money is back. In this series our reporter Miles Johnson investigates a mysterious murder in a small town that leads to a web of drugs, money laundering and state-sponsored assassinations stretching from Dublin to Dubai....
VIDEO INVESTIGATION For two years, Bertrand Monnet, a professor at Edhec and specialist in the economics of crime, filmed all the stages of the business model of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico for “Le Monde”. In this third episode, we go to Dubai with the “narco” and their financial advisors to learn how to launder...
The way many organised crime gangs launder their cash has become so hard to trace that following the money “gets you absolutely nowhere”, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency. When they are not using major high street banks as giant drug cash laundromats, organised crime groups such as drug traffickers are increasingly using international networks of...
Much like Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh, the war in Ukraine is now another “frozen conflict” derived from the fall of the Soviet Union. What the Kremlin calls its “near abroad,” is now an escalating proxy war between two nuclear superpowers. Dangerous stuff we have here. As global diplomats look for a path forward...